For something like ten thousand years people came back to this quarter-mile of sandstone cliff above Cottonwood Creek and pecked images into it, and some figures were reworked over thousands of years, the same tradition adding to its own pages. Most are the work of the ancestors of the Eastern Shoshone. The Crow and the Northern Arapaho know the site as well, but in interviews with the region's nations it is the Shoshone who have said they feel most closely tied to it. Archaeologists file the most striking figures, large and elaborate human-like forms, under the Dinwoody tradition, a style found only in the Bighorn and Wind River basins.
There are hundreds of petroglyphs on dozens of panels, and a few painted images. The state bought the site in 1973, the year it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Vandals have carved into the panels in recent years, and access is now controlled: check in first at Hot Springs State Park in Thermopolis, where the gate key is kept from October through April. The site lies about thirty miles northwest of Thermopolis on gravel roads off WY-120, with a short path along the base of the cliff. Touch nothing; the oils on a hand and the chalk some visitors bring both damage the rock.
The closest stops worth working into your route